Quincy Jones

As a composer, arranger, conductor, instrumentalist,
record company executive, magazine founder, and record, film and
television producer, Quincy Jones has had a spectacular influence
on American culture for more than 50 years.
Artists from every era of American popular
music, from bebop to hip hop, have turned to Quincy Jones to help
them achieve their best: Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, Nat King
Cole, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Andy Williams,
Peggy Lee, Lesley Gore, Aretha Franklin, Ringo Starr, Michael
Jackson, Chaka Khan, Donna Sommers, George Benson, and Barbra
Streisand. "He's Doctor Fixit," said Dizzy Gillespie.
"People go to him because he knows what he's doin'. He knows
the sound you've got in you, and he's got the experience and the
know-how to get it out.As a composer, arranger, conductor, instrumentalist,
record company executive, magazine founder, and record, film and
television producer, Quincy Jones has had a spectacular influence
on American culture for more than 50 years.

Artists from every era of American popular
music, from bebop to hip hop, have turned to Quincy Jones to help
them achieve their best: Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, Nat King
Cole, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Andy Williams,
Peggy Lee, Lesley Gore, Aretha Franklin, Ringo Starr, Michael
Jackson, Chaka Khan, Donna Sommers, George Benson, and Barbra
Streisand. "He's Doctor Fixit," said Dizzy Gillespie.
"People go to him because he knows what he's doin'. He knows
the sound you've got in you, and he's got the experience and the
know-how to get it out.

He has won 26 Grammy Awards and been nominated
76 times, an all-time record. He has composed 33 major motion
picture scores, has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, and
was awarded the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He
has earned world-wide acclaim as conductor and producer of the
historic "We Are the World" (the best-selling single
of all time), and produced the best-selling album in the history
of the recording industry: Michael Jackson's Thriller. As a creator
of new music, he has shuffled pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical,
African and Brazilian music into a dazzling fusion all his own.
In 1964, when he was named a vice-president of Mercury Records,
he became the first African-American to hold a high-level executive
position in a white-owned record company. And after composing
the score for Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker in 1965, he was the
first black composer embraced by the Hollywood establishment.
This year, Ebony Magazine named Jones the most powerful black
person in Hollywood.

By 13, Quincy Jones, grandson of a Mississippi
slave, had tried all the instruments in his school band in suburban
Seattle before settling on the trumpet. His best friend was a
local singer and pianist three years his senior named Ray Charles.
Together, they played all kinds of music for all kinds of people--a
situation that would be emblematic of his entire career. "At
school, we were playing John Philip Sousa and classical concert-band
music," says Jones. "We'd play dinner music at the white
tennis clubs, and later we'd play hard rhythm and blues at the
black social clubs. Then we'd go to the red-light district and
play for strippers and comics, and then play bebop into the early
morning-it was the greatest life in the world."

Eventually, Jones accepted an offer to go
on the road with bandleader Lionel Hampton, and this stint led
to works as arranger, and throughout the 50s he wrote charts for
Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington,
Dinah Washington, Cannonball Adderley, and his old friend Ray
Charles.

By 1956, Jones was performing as a trumpeter
and music director with the Dizzy Gillespie band on State Department-sponsored
tours of the Middle East and South America and in 1957 he settled
in Paris where he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and
Olivier Messiaen, and worked as a music director for Barclay Disques,
where he recorded the young Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour.

In 1964, Jones returned to the United States
to take the Mercury Records position and also composed his first
film score--The Pawnbroker, which was so successful that he left
Mercury and moved to Los Angeles. His film credits now include
Walk Don't Run, The Slender Thread, In Cold Blood, In the Heat
of the Night, A Dancy in Aspic, MacKenna's Gold, Bob and Carol
and Ted and Alice, Cactus Flower, and The Getaway. His career
in film reached a high point when he co-produced Steven Spielberg's
adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which was nominated
for 11 Oscars. For television, Jones wrote the theme music for
"Ironside" (the first synthesizer-based TV theme song),
"Sanford and Son," "The Bill Cosby Show" and
won an Emmy Award for the mini-series "Roots."

Back in the recording studio, Jones recorded
a series of chart-topping, Grammy-winning albums and in 1982 he
and Michael Jackson made history with Thriller, which sold over
30 million copies and produced an unprecedented six Top Ten singles.

In the early '90s, became co-CEO and chairman
of Quincy Jones/David Salzman Entertainment (QDE), a co-venture
with Time-Warner, Inc, which encompasses multi-media programming
for current and future technologies, including theatrical motion
pictures and television programs. He also runs his own record
label, Qwest Records and is chairman and CEO of Qwest Broadcasting,
one of the largest minority-owned broadcasting companies in the
United States.

Quincy Jones is also a lifelong activist.
He was a major supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.'s Operation
Breadbasket, and after King's death, he served on the board of
Jesse Jackson's People United to Save Humanity. An ongoing concern
throughout his life has been to foster appreciation of African-American
music and culture and to this end he helped form the Institute
for Black American Music, which was instrumental in establishing
a national library of African-American art and music. Jones is
also the founder of the annual Black Arts Festival in his hometown
of Chicago.